The invention relates to a method for automatically monitoring the performance of industrial equipment and to a device for implementing this method.
One field of application of the invention is for oxygen production units using one or more air, oxygen or nitrogen compressors to separate the components of air.
By monitoring the performance of the industrial equipment, the maintenance of the latter can be planned and its productivity checked. Thus, it is generally found that the benefits of an industrial equipment optimization project are often reduced to nothing after a few years if there is no monitoring that allows the slightest drift in the operation of this industrial equipment to be detected and corrected.
Thus, the operator of the industrial equipment desires to have an industrial equipment performance indicator that reliably reflects any deterioration in the equipment. Thus, it is necessary to be able to distinguish between deterioration of the industrial equipment and a simple variation in its operating conditions.
Document EP-B 516 534 describes a method of monitoring an apparatus operating under variable conditions, delivering a normalized performance parameter which is, for a gas turbine compressor that drives an alternator supplying an electric power distribution network, an air flow rate or a polytropic efficiency. This method uses a quantified model of the behavior of the apparatus to be monitored, established experimentally from measurements made on the apparatus when it is in a known internal state, for example when it is new. The measurements are made on influence parameters representative of variable conditions of external origin in which the apparatus is made to operate, such as the atmospheric pressure, the ambient temperature, the ambient humidity, the flow rate of a fuel feeding the turbine, the composition of the fuel, the temperature of the fuel, the thermal stabilization state of the turbine with its compressor and the frequency of the electric power distribution network. However, this model is not suitable for monitoring the performance of the aforementioned gas production units. In particular, this method does not allow fine monitoring of a performance factor, such as the energy consumption or the isothermal efficiency of a compressor, this being barely correlated with the aforementioned influence parameters.